An Ayurvedic theory of cancer

Abstract

Ayurveda is a healing system widely practiced throughout South Asia. It is founded upon a set of Sanskrit texts composed two thousand years ago which describe in detail a theory of humoral balance within the body. The name Ayurveda means "that which has been seen to be true about long life." In 1975 in southern Tamil Nadu, an aged practitioner of Ayurveda conducted for the author's benefit a series of lectures about cancer, in which he propounded his own idiosyncratic theory regarding the nature of this disease. The doctor's lectures were a linguistic and topical pastiche, melding Indian and Western biologies, psychologies, and sociologies. The lectures were fascinating for they demonstrated many lines of kinship between ideas expressed in the ancient Sanskrit texts and ideas afloat still in the modern world. But for all their richness Mahadeva Iyer's lectures were seemingly unfocused, and his motives for developing them were unclear to the author. Only when the author was able to see these lectures, not as cultural artifacts, but as messages addressed from one historically situated personality to another, did the reason for the doctor's conveyance of them to her become clear.